"karamonde" wrote in message

First of all let me say that the anti-bot filter made it hard for ME!
Especially the "type the 6 digits or letters you see in the box" - I
couldn't see most of them!

Most of us don't have the problem of the '6 digits' because we don't use
garden banter. Most of us use 'newsgroups' aka 'usenet'. If you want to
know what that is (and how easy it is to use as opposed to garden banter,
which steals our posts and puts them on it's forum site) then use google to
look up those 2 terms.

Anyway, the question I have is this: I picked up ~15 acorns last October
from 2 oaks near my house and planted them in a flowerpot, somewhere mid
December I decided to dig around them and check for roots - by gently
testing whether the acorns were loose or not. Turns out that 7 of them
had rooted, of those 3 made it to oak seedlings which are now ~20cm tall
each and starting to leaf. The plants were outside throughout the winter
and until now with the exception of 10 days that I was away and brought
them in the house to avoid drying out (it was quite hot), now since I
put them back outside their leaves drooped. Originally I thought that
their leaves may be too heavy for them and that nature will take its
course, however last night I put them back in the house to shield from
very high winds and rain and in 24 hours their leaves have perked up
almost perpendicular to the stem.

No need to bother with any of that faffing round. Oaks are tough. We leave
ours outside from the time they are stuffed into the milk cartons as acorns
till they are planted out into windbreaks of a paddock. and it gets a lot
hotter here in Oz than it does in the UK and we are also pretty sloppy about
the care they get and we've yet to have any die on us that I can recall.
I've got about 26 Red/Scarlet Oaks in containers ATM and about 15 common old
oaks.

Is this normal? Could it be caused by the cold that we are having this
week?

Few of us here would know about the cold you're getting since most of us are
in other o****ries than you. The majority of people here are in the US and
then there are a couple of Aussies and a few Brits.

Am I confusing them by alternating temperature between indoors and
outdoors?

Probably. Just leave the poor things in the one spot till they are ready to
go in the ground. Not full sun by preference but certainly where they get
good light and not too much shade.

I am attaching a photograph from last Saturday to illustrate what I
mean, the plant at the back has been the faster grower, I think I got
two species here, Q. robur (the red/brown coloured leaves) and Q.
petraea.

Most of us will not be able to see any pic since we use newsgroups. For us,
you'd need to put them on a site such as photobucket and then provide us
with a link.

A friend who also grew oaks years ago said "You're worrying too much,
just leave them outside - they look fine".

I gree totally with your friend. Yours are more likely to keel over and ie
than if you'd left them to quietly get on with things in a sensible spot.

Comments?